Baptism of the Lord (January 8, 2023)
Jesus said and did a lot of hard-to-explain things, one of them being his decision to wade into the Jordan River and ask John the Baptist to baptize him.
Understandably, Christians who see baptism as connected to the absolution of sin have a particularly difficult time figuring out why Jesus wanted to be baptized. If Jesus was sinless, why would need to respond to John’s call for repentance?
Honestly, I don’t know. I don’t know what baptism truly accomplishes, and if it does have something to do with getting rid of sin, I don’t know why Jesus felt compelled to undergo it. It’s odd, too, that while the Gospels indicate that Jesus’ disciples baptized people at Jesus’ direction, they never depict Jesus baptizing anyone himself.
The explanation for Jesus baptism that I like the most, though, is rooted in the idea that baptism is about making a covenant with God, about identifying oneself both as someone who belongs to God and as someone to whom God belongs. It’s an overtly mutual thing. I don’t just take possession of God, and God doesn’t just take possession of me. In baptism, we take possession of each other.
Seen in this context, Jesus’ baptism makes perfect sense to me. He stepped into the Jordan with John the way he steps into the baptism with anyone who meets him there. My Anabaptist forebears tended to discount baptism unless one entered into it with willing awareness of what one was doing. Thus, they took a dim view of infant baptism, because babies who are being baptized generally have no clue what is happening beyond the immediate sense of being momentarily held be a stranger and feeling some perhaps uncomfortable wetness in the vicinity of their foreheads. How can a child make a covenant with God without knowing who God is, or even that God is at all?
The answer, perhaps, is that Jesus is standing there with us, having waded in to receive from us whatever we bring, no matter how little there is of it, and to give us more than any one of us could possibly fathom, no matter how sober and wise.
